


Galactic Game

by Gyptian



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame Fix-It, Canon Divergence, Character Study, F/M, Families of Choice, Gen, Manifesto Against Toxic Masculinity, Minor Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau, Multi, No Misogyny, No character bashing, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2019-11-22
Packaged: 2021-02-17 23:36:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21518320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gyptian/pseuds/Gyptian
Summary: Carol Danvers sent Yon-Rogg home in shame with a declaration of war. This is what happened after, had Yon-Rogg happened upon Stark and Nebula first.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Tony Stark & Yon-Rogg
Comments: 21
Kudos: 79
Collections: Marvel Trumps Hate 2018





	Galactic Game

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dls/gifts).



> This mad fic started with the premise: what if (suspected) Mar-Vell (Jude Law) and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) were the reincarnations of John Watson (Jude Law) and Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr)? Then Jude Law turned out to play Yon-Rogg. Then Captain Marvel came out and it could have been better. Then Avengers: Endgame came out and it could have been better. In all, the fic took over a year to be written and rewritten. I hope you enjoy.
> 
> Beta'ed by the marvelous [Sadisticsparkle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadisticsparkle/pseuds/Sadisticsparkle) who has my deepest thanks.

A crowd lined the street when Yon-Rogg’s battered party reached it. It didn't back off, even though they stank enough to make stars fall. Walls of bodies stood in a straight line. The aisle left open for their pathetic procession opened up in the distance, where a prisoner transport stood open, in the shade of a living tower. As they entered the clear pathway, boots drumming on the street’s metal plates, the jeering started. A sharp hiss rose into cat-calls and screeching.

Yon-Rogg looked straight ahead.

He was a man without honor and a leader who’d failed his soldiers. He deserved it. He deserved it all.

He had made landfall on Hala in a claustrophobic escape pod. It rattled as if it would fall apart at any moment. Vers had overloaded its engines to make the trip. Ronan’s ship had met him on the edge of the Sol system and escorted him the whole way, not deigning to pick him up and let him out of his coffin.

“Why would I when you’ve clearly been sent to arrive in style?” Ronan had asked over the comm when Yon-Rogg had finished yelling at him.

Ronan had been happy to allowed Vers’ shaming to reach its conclusion, smug bastard that he was.

Fresh from battle, Yon-Rogg had still cared enough to wonder where he’d gone wrong with his protege. Why his respect and his trust had been repaid with scorn and betrayal. She’d always been such an asshole, but damned if she hadn’t charmed the pants off him. The dutiful soldier that would poke at sore spots with a smile dancing in her eyes. Only Minn-Erva had been immune.

His heartbreak had still been splattered all over his face when what was left of his team had opened up the pod. They were inscrutable, fallen from grace and sent to escort their failure of a commander. The one who’d allowed a traitor to get away. Failed his team. Failed Starforce. Failed Hala.

At least he’d healed enough to step out of the pod under his own power. They wouldn’t have to drag him down the street to face his judgment.

They exited the impact crater at a decent clip. Ronan, may his dick roast slowly, had redirected the pod to land in the Central Dumps, where all of Starforce’s garbage went.

He nodded one last time to At-Lass and Minn-Erva. One with shoulders bowed beneath the heavy weight of loss and betrayal. The other spitfire mad, face too close to ‘I told you so’ for comfort. They would be re-assigned and have to make their own way out of the pit of shame he’d dug for them.

The transport took him, alone, to meet the Heart of the Supreme Intelligence, where the fibres of his being would be torn apart to be examined one by one, classified and put away. No gentle interface, no mellow conversation for him. Not the wretch he was now.

He made his way down dark branching tunnels on his own, a glowing line showing him where he needed to go beneath the watchful eyes of Hala, transmitting to the cameras. The Supreme Intelligence would broadcast his humiliation planet-wide.

When he arrived at the dark pool he entered. With a slorp, he went under.

An eternity of pain in a millisecond. An unmaking.

Then, _him facing a spunky human female at gunpoint._

_His failure to kill her._

_His failure to prevent her from absorbing the power he’d been sent to retrieve._

_His inappropriate fascination prompting him to donate his own blood._

_The Supreme Intelligence, with Vers’ face, telling him that soldiers control their emotions._

_His failure to reign her in on Torfa._

_His failure to inform Ronan of her location._

_His failure to stop her, to kill her, again, again._

_His final bluff failing. Her slap sending him flying, unmanned. All that power, slipping out of his control._

“I believe you have a message for me,” said the Supreme Intelligence, still wearing Vers’ face, lips curled with the same contempt Vers’d shown in those final moments on C53.

He nodded, tired, and it played out as it had in memory. The Intelligence let him feel all of the pain as if it was fresh again. A shock would go through the crowd, followed by derision, he knew. The Kree, after all, were supposed to be untouchable. As Starforce, he was part of Kree's elite. His fall from grace had to be made into an example. It had to be clear he was fundamentally flawed.

When the display was done, the Supreme Intelligence let him reform, lying face down in the desert. “You want to die,” she said, “so I’m going to let you live. Live with your regrets.”

His punishment had been pronounced. No honourable death for him.

So he remained contracted with Starforce, less than a footsoldier. He was packed off in a patrol ship and instructed to make the rounds past all of Thanos' former hide-outs.

He could report when he found signs of the Mad Titan. Otherwise, he was on his own. It was lonely and boring... which was rather the point.

The first year his skin had itched for the touch of another. Over the following years the numbness had set in, from the skin inward to his battered heart.

Now, for the first time in twenty years he’d received a signal that wasn’t an automated acknowledgment of his weekly reports. The message was too garbled to make any sense.

A flicker of hope that he might be ordered to come home... or be assigned another task... sat in his breast long enough to flare up and burn in his throat.

Nothing followed.

He swallowed, tasting ashes.

He systematically scanned through subspace frequencies, cycle after a cycle while his ship floated towards Titan-That-Was, his next stop.

There. A distress call.

Not the same message, not Kree at all, but a distress call. Something to do.

He set a course for the ship and pulled up alongside it. It didn't even have enough juice to set course for the nearest planet at sub-light speed.

He scanned the half-dead wreck. Two lifesigns, one mostly android and one... human. Really?

Yon-Rogg resisted the urge to slam his fists on the buttons while he was sat at the one station where everything worked.

A native of C53, that cursed planet.

*~*

He could breathe the air on the ship, barely. He let his helmet recede so he could greet his enemies showing his face. “Do not fear, I come to answer your distress call,” he announced, stepping through the airlock he had wrenched open, because their communication system was also close to death.

He froze and swallowed, then, his Adam's apple brushing a razor edge. A blue cyborg with a fierce expression had pressed it up against his neck. “Who are you?” she demanded. The voice sparked recognition and then – _that face_ sent cold shivers down his spine, chased by sweat.

Nebula. What was Thanos' lackey doing here?

“Helping out.”

“You're _Kree,_ ” she accused him and, well...

“I am. I am also the only hope you've got.”

She scoffed but lowered her blade, allowing him to step through the airlock and letting it close. Good. His ship really shouldn't be doing double time to keep up the atmosphere. “I heard of you,” she continued in the same tone, “when I still worked for Thanos. You're the leader of Starforce's best team. The one they send to subjugate planets with a viable resistance movement.”

He opened his mouth to correct her, then closed it, rewinding what she said. “You're his daughter, not his employee.”

A queer smile crossed her face. “Then I suppose I'll be committing patricide.”

Really not working for Thanos anymore, then. Alright. Back to the business at hand before the lack of oxygen made him too light-headed to defend himself. “Can you get your friend so we can get off this ship?”

She looked at him for a long moment. “Yes,” she decided and jogged down the hallway, returning with an emaciated man clutching a helmet against his chest.

“Where we going?” mumbled he against Nebula's vest.

“To a ship with a functioning life-support system, Stark. We'll figure it out from there.” Her face was stern but her hands cradled her companion as she carried him past Yon-Rogg. He directed them to the side room that was either cell or med-bay, depending on whether the force field was up. She lay him down on the bed. “Do you have liquid meals?” she asked. He nodded to the cargo bay that held a year's worth.

He shuffled back to the cockpit, unsettled by what he had seen. Why had he let them aboard? One of Thanos' daughters, gone rogue, and an inhabitant of C53. He really should have left them for dead, except that they were the first people he had seen in years.

The ship seemed a little smaller, even filled with enemies.

His discombobulation made him miss the warm light that had started to shine through the windows as a star seemed to approach. He looked up from his hands that had started to put in C53's coordinates.

A glowing humanoid floated on the other side of the glass.

The ghost that cursed him, come back to haunt him.

Vers.

*~*

Yon-Rogg hung back in a corner of the room, letting the humans sniff about each other like the barbarians they were and establish a pecking order. The emaciated one he had brought onto his ship before it was plucked out of space was barely managing to sit up straight.

He straightened up when Vers withdrew from the argument to stand beside him.

“Thanos,” he said, without looking at her.

“Yes,” she said

“Half of Hala is dead. Half of all _Kree_ are dead.” It could not be, they were too powerful for that mad rogue and his bastardised minion clones.

“Half of everyone is dead,” she said and it was Vers all over, the shut-down face and the flat voice after a failed mission had her clam up tight.

Before he knew it, he had turned to her, offer support as he always had. He stopped short at the sight of her uniform turned blue and red, the short hair that would not wave in a glorious mane when she put on her helmet in vacuum or air or water.

Still it was Vers, not glowing, not yelling, just standing. “I...How are you?” he found himself asking.

She approached him and calmly said, “You violated my mind. You manipulated my memories. You changed my body. You tried to bend me to your will. You tried to hold me back.” She glanced back at the Avengers, who seemed to be sorting themselves out now, the sick human gone. “We are here, we are all here, in order to undo what we can of what the abomination that is Thanos did. But make no mistake, Yon-Rogg.”

She quirked the crooked grin that had always made his heart melt. “You are beneath me.”

The shell of apathy that had built up over the years cracked. The hot shame dammed up behind it poured over him.

He blacked out.

*~*

He came back to his senses while a bird twittered and a human voice wittered on in the distance. Sunlight sat mellow on his skin. Outside, then.

He floated in the ruddy glow behind his closed eyelids until the voice came closer, or perhaps fog retreated from his mind and allowed him to hear. “...had Pepper. I was the luckiest man in the world and it took the world ending several times before I realised just how much. What I'm saying is, if I can find redemption, arrogant bastard that I am, so can anyone. I mean, took a genius intellect for me to get my head out of my arsehole. I bet you would have an easier time. You sound like a clever man with some sense of honour, even if it's been twisted to hell and back in the service of your robot overlord.” So the chatter continued, like fat sitting on water far above his head. Yon-Rogg couldn't be bothered to surface quite yet.

Only when shade started to chill his skin did he open his eyes. He lay on his side on a stretch covered by a green ground-cover plant between the building and his ship.

“You collapsed,” said the human. “Danvers says she found you trying to get to your ship but you're not used to breathing air as polluted as Earth's.”

“Where?” he croaked. Why was he guarded by an injured stranger rather than his tormentor?

The human was parked in a chair on wheels in front of his face. “Look, I don't know how they do it in your macho-man dictatorship, but here we do not make victims face their assaulters when they don't have to, so. It's me you get.” He shrugged. “You did try to save my life.”

Yon-Rogg grunted.

*~*

Thanos had retired to a farm. Killing him had not achieved anything at all.

Yon-Rogg's resentment at having to sit out their grand revenge changed into despair at the news.

*~*

Humans apparently came in various shades of brown, as Kree did blue.

Yon-Rogg watched from a distance as a young woman embraced Vers, who was about to leave again.

“That's her daughter, apparently, or as good as,” said Stark besides him.

Yon-Rogg looked up. The man had filled out over the past weeks, still close to a skeleton but able to walk around and feed himself. He held a bag in one hand.

“Life goes on, even with everything we've lost,” Stark mused, eyes on the sight of the two women.

Yon-Rogg looked back at them. Vers had stepped back and started to glow. She shot off into space with only a small shockwave and with no technological aid. He felt nothing at the sight.

Then his eyes were drawn back to her... daughter. Odd. He'd never considered Vers' life before he met her. Kree warriors did not start families until they retired, if they did at all.

“Was she married?” he asked. Did humans even do that? Had her daughter been left behind?

“No. Women couldn't, back then.” Stark sighed. “I met her ex. She married a colleague of mine. It's a sad story.”

“Yeah,” whispered Yon-Rogg's mouth, disconnected from his brain, which was running in circles with nowhere to turn.

Stark put a hand on his shoulder. His skin shuddered at the strange sensation. “Listen. I may regret this but I've extended the invitation to everyone else here, so. If you ever need a change of scene, come look me up. I need to get out of here.”

*~*

Fourteen months passed before Yon-Rogg visited the Stark household.

He had nothing to do. He was used to that.

He had nowhere to go. As time passed, that became unbearable.

*~*

Pepper Stark handed him a cup full of the hot, bitter stimulant humans revered. It was a luxury product now, an honour to have it made for him. He did not dare to refuse. He forced a smile. “Thank you.”

“Oh God, please don't try to act human. You're not the first alien I've met,” she told him, face mild and eyebrow lifted. “Not to mention I've tied myself for life to the strangest man on the planet.”

“My ears are burning,” Stark exclaimed while he ran up the stairs and planted a kiss on his wife's lips.

“Not in front of the guests,” she admonished with an indulgent smile.

Stark made a noise of denial in the back of his throat. “I am an old man used to flaunting my wealth. You'll just have to put up with it.” He swung around and scrutinised Yon-Rogg. “Took you awhile. I didn't think you would come, since we spoke to each other only a handful of times.”

He had spoken to the other Avengers even less. And the walls had started to close in on him, more than his ship ever did.

“Well, _that's_ a face,” Stark mumbled. “Anyone in particular?”

Yon-Rogg shook his head.

“Alright. Well. Can't tell you about all our cool technology in case you ever run back to your home planet or whatever, but. Uhm.” The man spun himself around five times, until he came to a stop facing the windows. “Right. Can't beat the classics. Have you ever gone fishing?”

Yon-Rogg shook his head.

Pepper laughed them out the door.

He used the fishing rod they gave him whenever he came over for a day.

*~*

He took an axe to the ice one December morning. He cast the line with bait on the hook into the circle of water carefully. He sat down in an ice-cold Adirondack chair. His faded red winter coat nearly matched the wood of the chair.

His breath puffed out in clouds that rose up to the sky. He looked at the hidden stars and thought of Hala. Not Hala now, but Hala when she had been home, full of glory and pomp and promise that had found their focus in the strange alien he'd brought home.

He had staked everything on her, defended her survival to Minn-Erva and the Great Intelligence, given her his blood when she had started to seize with the power that coursed through her. He had trained her and taken her along, the woman he had remade in his own image, who would eclipse him if she could.

She had, just not in the way he had thought. And he had never considered what he had done from her perspective. He hadn’t considered what it had done to his team.

He did so this day, until his muscles were frozen.

Stark came to him when the sun was setting, a thickly wrapped bundle strapped to his chest. “You done thinking yet?” he asked, as he always did.

“I am a very arrogant bastard,” said Yon-Rogg, this time, rather than the affirmative he'd given on previous occasions.

Stark exhaled a long stream of warm air that condensed into a cloud until he looked like a chimney, painting in shades of rose and gold. “Well, it's a start.”

He was invited for dinner. He ended up staying overnight. He never left.

*~*

The ground was still frozen when he settled down on the pier to fish, though patches of fresh green grass had started to appear. Pepper came to visit him with a corned beef sandwich at lunch. Stark must have been occupied in his lab again. She sat down in the chair next to him, legs nearly touching.

Warmth curled through his frozen heart at the sight of her proximity.

“Morgan did not want to settle down,” was her opener, because she could talk about the baby without prompting all day and he usually just nodded.

Today he did not. “What-” He scraped his throat. “What's it like, having a daughter?”

She blinked, once, but switched tracks easily. She was married to Tony Stark, after all, who delighted in asking off-the-wall questions about the most trivial subjects. His latest excuse was that he was training himself to do the same for his daughter. “Exhausting. Complicated. Never convenient.” She leaned forward, clasped her hands and smiled down at them. “The best thing that ever happened to me.”

“I see.”

They ate their sandwiches in silence. She left him to his thoughts.

While his eyes lingered on the water, his mind lingered on Vers and her having had a daughter before they met. She had been a favourite teacher among young Starforce trainees. He’d always congratulated himself on having taught her that. He had treated her as an extension of himself in all things, when she had lived a full life without him, even before they met.

*~*

He had lived with Pepper and Tony for two years when he descended to the lab and knocked on the door. Tony still came out to meet him, rather than letting him in, but led him up to the living room and made them coffee and tea.

“How do I right a terrible wrong I’ve done?”

“Ah.” Tony's eyes bored into him as they never had before. “Tell me your side of the story.”

Yon-Rogg did.

*~*

The tender application of amicable company chipped away at the shame that had consumed his soul. The years alone in exile had turned his heart to ice, compressed into a glacier. Until he came upon the end of the valley and here, now, exposed to air, ice melted into fresh water. It ran in small rivulets, here, there, until entire blocks of ice sheered off and fell to the ground, collapsing, becoming something new.

“You look like a man deep in thought,” said a hoarse baritone beside him, before a sticky paw gave him a hearty slap on the shoulder. “Ah, you are not as frail as a human. I like you.” Thor took a pull from the two-litre jug of pilsner he had taken along on their excursion.

Yon-Rogg glanced at the King of Asgard. “I suppose I am.” He turned back to the mouth of the valley, where the diminished glacier cringed. A small figure, black hair flying, stood in front of it, blue hands on a pale, shining casket.

The ice grew gradually, a metre, two. Then the earth rumbled. The mellow grey clouds grew an angry purple and opened up to dump snow on them. Wind suddenly thundered past them. Yon-Rogg was suddenly grabbed about the waist by a meaty arm that hoisted him up into the air. Below him, the growing glacier galloped across the ground where they had stood. A cackling Loki rode by below, atop its foremost ridge, the eye of the storm. Thor yelled congratulations after his brother.

“Ah, fantastic. You will tell Stark we can uphold our end of the deal. We will restore the Greenland glaciers in return for an ARC reactor,” Thor told Yon-Rogg, who hung like a sack of potatoes over the Asgardian's shoulder.

Yon-Rogg grunted his assent.

The Valkyrie awaited them in the village with crossed arms, her people behind her. Thor dropped Yon-Rogg to complete a warrior's greeting, echoed by his still-blue brother. “Rejoice, brothers and sisters, we have shown Stark's man that we can honour the deal he proposed. We will have enough electricity to deck out the entire village for Yule and play Fortnite all night long on Midwinter."

A cheer went up from the crowd.

“We'll be able to keep our houses warm as well, I presume?” the Valkyrie rebutted.

“Indeed!” said Thor, exuberance undiminished. He strode off towards his house.

“Thor!” Yon-Rogg yelled after him. “I have another question for you, from Morgan Stark. Since you like gaming.”

*~*

“I'm sorry, Thor doesn't want to play Minecraft,” Yon-Rogg said, staring into Morgan's watering eyes and feeling like a heel. She could have been a Kree child. Fierce, curious, similar in appearance. The only difference was that Morgan flung herself into each emotion with enthusiasm and expressed it body and soul. Kree children were taught a warrior's stoicism as soon as they became self-aware.

Morgan was sometimes the easiest Stark to be around. So easy to understand. So different from everything he knew. Now, though, he felt like he wanted to run from the four-year-old he'd had to disappoint.

“Thor is a poopyhead,” she concluded.

He sighed in relief. “I _completely_ agree.” He hesitated for a few moments. “I could play Minecraft with you, if you like. I haven't played a computer game, but I'm very good at fighting.”

Morgan frowned up at him in thought. “It's a _building_ game.”

“Oh.”

“It's got a lot of monsters, though. I can do the building and you can help fight them off.”

He kneeled before her and felt his whole being light up when she took the opportunity to give him a hug. “Sounds like an excellent plan.”

“Yay!” she said. “I'm gonna ask Dad to give you a better laptop. The one you have now is pants for gaming.” The quick patter of her clogs disappeared down the steps to the lab, followed by a plaintive “Da- _haaad!_ Open _up!”_

Yon-Rogg turned to the kitchen. Now he'd been recruited she'd want to play right away. He had better forage the kitchen for drinks and snacks to last them a few hours.

Pepper stood leaning against the wall where the living room disappeared around a corner and became the entrance hall. A smile peeked out from behind the fingers she had pressed against her lips. Her fire hair haloed her head, loose for once.

“I...” he stuttered.

She strode towards him and kissed him on the cheek. “That was very kind of you,” she said, before disappearing upstairs, leaving him behind, speechless.

“She does tend to have that effect,” an amused Tony said behind him.

Yon-Rogg completed the circle to look back at where Morgan had disappeared. She now triumphantly sat on her father's hip, laptop between their chests. “I didn't - I wouldn't -” he stuttered, unsure if he needed to apologise. She had touched him, hugged him before. This kiss seemed to cross another line, though.

“Pepper helped me believe I could be a better man when I was the richest, most selfish asshole on the planet,” Tony said in a thicker voice. “She gave me something to live for even with half the universe dead.” He closed the gap between them.

Tony pulled Yon-Rogg's face towards him with a thumb and finger hooked around his chin. He kissed him on the other cheek. “There, now. We're even.”

“Me, too, Uncle Yogg!” Morgan exclaimed inches from their ears and while they winced, placed a big, smacking kiss on Yon-Rogg's other cheek. She followed it up with a raspberry that landed on his ear lobe. Yon-Rogg pulled back, rubbing at his ringing ear.

“Careful, honey,” said Tony, laughter in his voice. Yon-Rogg glared at him. Tony laughed harder. Morgan chimed in with her own peal of giggles.

Yon-Rogg felt the last metal chain constricting his chest loosen up and fall away. He felt as if he might float up to the ceiling, as light as he felt. He took a deep breath.

*~*

“What weapons did you have when you fought for the Kree?” Stark asked one day. And it was Stark, not Tony, the veteran with a closed face and the weight of the world on his shoulder. He always was in the days after one of the Captain's bimonthly visits.

Yon-Rogg looked up at him. “They were called Magnitron Gauntlets. I could manipulate gravity in small areas for seconds at the time.” He looked inwards, towards memories that had been gathering dust in the corners of his mind. “Each Starforce Officer designs a custom weapon as their capstone project in their final year at the Officer Academy. To prove their mastery of their own abilities, their understanding of technology and how well-versed and imaginative they are when it comes to weapons. Why?”

“Curiosity, mostly. I designed and sold weapons, once. It was the business I inherited from my dad. Think you remember enough to re-create the design?”

“Yes.” It had been with him 20 hours a day, 433 days a year, while he finished up his training.

“Come on, then.”

And that was how Yon-Rogg was invited to Tony Stark's inner sanctum after living with him for four years.

*~*

Yon-Rogg could only stare from afar as Tony was swatted away, suit of armour half gone.

“I am inevitable,” said Thanos.

A dull metal click.

Tony held up his gauntleted hand, each knuckle a point of light, raw potential crackling down his arms like thunder, already eating away at him.

“And I... am... Iron Man.”

Tony Stark snapped his fingers with bitter glory shining from his every cell, the stones' power racing along his body in poison veins. Yon-Rogg blasted his own gauntlets at the ground now, to launch him across to where the man was collapsing. He clasped his hands around Tony's wrist. “Give some of that to me!” he demanded.

Tony rasped an nonverbal protest.

“I can stand it, damn you! I'm stronger and I should have died a long time ago, anyway,” he hissed in Tony's face.

As if consent was the magic switch, the stones filleted his being as the Supreme Intelligence once had. He was pulled apart, little by little, every atom, every moment that was him. They mingled with the being that was Tony Stark, two gases mixing but not reacting, before they separated again, panting.

“No,” grunted Stark, tried to _pull_ but quickly succumbed, head slumping on Yon-Rogg's shoulder as he felt the strength in his own legs go.

*~*

He woke to obnoxious twinned bee-beeping. He let it wash over him, taking stock of the sounds in the room. Irregular treads of people passing by in a hallway, but not close by. The zoom of a device going off. The slow breath of another being in deep sleep. The below-the-skin hum he felt whenever Tony and he fell asleep together on the sofa, watching musicals with Morgan.

Tony. His eyes flew open. His body would not move, too heavy. With effort, he managed to turn his head to see a familiar profile from the corner of his eye.

Alive.

They had survived.

Yon-Rogg triumphantly saluted the universe with a mental middle finger and fell back asleep.

*~*

The next time he woke it was because he was punched in the gut. A glance proved it was Morgan, who had dived onto his stomach and was now scrambling to sit up on the bed. “Hi!” she said, oblivious to his breathless state.

He waved back.

“We brought flowers.” She pointed at a monstrosity made up of purple and pink flowers, ribbon plentiful throughout.

He nodded.

“Honeybunch. Don't I get a hug?” So Morgan threw herself onto Tony’s stomach next. Yon-Rogg laughed silently at his bug-eyed grimace.

“Happy is bringing cheeseburgers! I told him he should,” she announced. Tony grinned widely down at her.

Yon-Rogg groaned. Sweet death, take him before he had to eat that garbage. “You can have mine”.

“No, momma says you have to eat your meal, your whole meal, no 'ceptions,” Morgan raised her eyebrows in imitation of Pepper's no-nonsense face.

“I am _not_ eating the pickle.”

“That's alright, we can trade. You can have my tomato slice.”

“Deal.”

After, Happy had come and gone. He updated them on how the rest of the Avengers had fared and the total chaos that the return of half the world's population had caused. After, Pepper sat down, curled up in an armchair between the two beds, heels off, story book open in her lap. After, Morgan dozed off on Tony's shoulder and was put down in a cot set up by the wall for her and Pepper. After...

Tony slowly wiggled out from under fine cotton sheets. He pecked Pepper on her head. She smiled up at him sleepily, before returning to work on her tablet. He crossed to Yon-Rogg's bed and looked down at him with sleepy eyes.

“When you caught my wrist...” he trailed off, massaged the blankets between his hands. “When you _saved me_ , all I could think-” Stark cut himself off, swallowed. A click and the darkening of the room indicated that Pepper had switched her tablet off. Tony planted his hands besides Yon-Rogg's shoulders. “I wanted to do this.”

Tony Stark embraced him in a crushing hug. Yon-Rogg, though he would never admit it, whined and grabbed handfuls of his greasy hair.

Slender fingers slid in-between his. Pepper, clasping his hand.

They parted. “Well,” said a disheveled Tony. He brushed calloused thumbs across Yon-Rogg's cheekbones. “Welcome to the family.”

*~*

He was sat on the pier with his fishing rod for the first time since his recovery when Vers came to visit.

They looked at Tony and Morgan tossing a baseball back and forth for a long time.

“You were always good with kids,” said she.

“So were you,” said he.

They were silent.

Somewhere, from the depths of the heart the Starks had healed, he dug up the courage to say, “I can never make it right, what I did to you. The life I stole from you.”

“No, you can't,” said she, in the measured voice he had taught her, when he had been convinced he knew better than everyone what was right and what was wrong.

“For what it's worth, I apologise. I...” he swallowed. “I could live with losing my family.”

After she let the conversation lapse another long while, she said, “I did not know I had lost them, Maria and Monica.” Softer, “I missed them anyway.”

He turned to look up at her. “You are a far better person than I,” he admitted and was surprised to find it didn't hurt. He had lost his honour long ago and slowly shed his bitter pride these last few years. Love was a far better thing to live for.

The wry grin he had always loved, the part of her that was never his, that he could never quash or control, curled her lips now. “I know.”

She held out her hand.

He stood to take it.

“Carol Danvers. Good to meet you.”

“Yon-Rogg.” He blinked, and with his stomach at a queer angle, said, “Yon-Rogg Stark. Well met.”

**Author's Note:**

> A preemptive note should it not have been clear: I consider Captain Marvel to have been fully in the right in the movie in her reaction to the men who tried to control her in her life, even if the movie's presentation was sometimes clumsy. It's just that this sort of violence has become dangerously normal in Hollywood movies. For an excellent perspective, I refer you to Legal Eagle's breakdown of [a deleted scene that caused a ruckus on this subject.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIoWt2jPiK0)


End file.
